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The House Select Committee on Benghazi has settled a lawsuit brought by a former staffer who alleged that he was fired in part because he was unwilling to focus solely on the State Department and Hillary Clinton in order to understand the attacks, attorneys for the staffer said. The settlement ends a messy dispute that raised questions about whether the committee — formed to investigate the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans at U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya — was trying to achieve partisan goals. The staffer, Bradley Podliska, alleged in court papers that he was fired “because he...

Washington Lawyers’ Committee client Kevin Ziober testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs in support of the Justice for Servicemembers Act of 2016. This legislation would clarify longstanding protections for service members under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). Committee Deputy Director of Litigation Peter Romer-Friedman and Mr. Ziober held a press conference with Senators Blumenthal and Franken on June 29th. For more information, see: Kevin Ziober’s testimony Video of Kevin Ziober testimony Video of the press conference Uniformed...

Editor's note: This story was originally published Sunday, June 26, 2016. It was updated to reflect congressional testimony made Wednesday, June 29. Kevin Ziober was a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve in 2012 when he received deployment orders to Afghanistan. On his last day of work before leaving, dozens of co-workers gathered for a sendoff. There was a cake and balloons. And then, Ziober says, he was summoned to the human resources office — and fired. Ziober believes he was fired because of his military service and the inconvenience it caused his employer. If so, that would be a violation of...

Tara Zoumer thought she had found her dream job when she was hired at WeWork, a $16 billion start-up that rents office space to young entrepreneurs. The walls were adorned with Pop Art. Neon light fixtures encouraged employees to “Hustle harder,” and there was beer on tap. * * * But shortly after she became an associate community manager in WeWork’s office in Berkeley, Calif., reality set in. Ms. Zoumer said she was feeling pinched because her annual salary was only $42,000, a sum that, on some weeks, left her without money to ride the subway. She said she thought many of her duties — leading...

A former investigator for Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi filed a lawsuit against the panel and its chairman on Monday, contending that they had illegally fired and defamed him. The former investigator, Bradley F. Podliska, said in the suit that he had been dismissed because he left the committee for several weeks to fulfill his duties as an Air Force reservist. It also said that after it was revealed in October that Mr. Podliska planned to file a complaint against the committee, the chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, made false statements...

A former investigator for the House Benghazi Committee filed a federal lawsuit against the committee Monday, opening a new chapter in legal skirmishes over the Benghazi attacks and subsequent investigations. Last month, Brad Podliska, an Air Force Reserve major, alleged the Benghazi committee terminated him based on his military obligations and his refusal to advance an agenda targeting Hillary Clinton. Now, Podliska is detailing those charges in court in a new filing that alleges Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy broke the law by defaming him in their public battle over Podliska’s firing. Gowdy...

The Republican leaders of a House committee who have been in a bitter partisan battle with Democrats are enmeshed in a new fight with one of the committee’s former staff members. A former investigator for the Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi plans to file a complaint in federal court next month alleging that he was fired unlawfully in part because his superiors opposed his efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in the Libyan city. Instead, they focused primarily on the role of the State Department and...

Two FedEx mechanics have accused the shipping company of short-changing thousands of its workers nationwide who took military leave to serve in the National Guard and reserves by contributing less to their pensions than they were entitled to. In a proposed class action filed in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday, Clifton Cunningham and Don Teed claimed that FedEx did not apply the right formula to calculate their pension contributions as required by the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), a law governing civilian employers' duties to uniformed...

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